Why is Chris England the only lawmaker who cares about the waste, fraud and abuse in Alabama’s Department of Corrections?
It’s honestly one of the weirdest things I’ve ever encountered.
Everyone knows the place is a mess. Everyone knows that we’re operating houses of human torture for no reason other than we’re completely incapable of operating with competence and decency. Everyone knows that we’re wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.
Yet, at a time when everyone is claiming that they want to root out waste, fraud and abuse, England is the only one actually doing it when it comes to the single greatest crooked agency in our state’s history.
And he pulls no punches.
“When you have an agency that has no oversight, it’s not transparent, is full down to the core with corruption, it starts getting expensive,” England said during a recent interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast. “You start being easy to exploit. You start getting easier to be taken advantage of because the core mission isn’t taking care of those that are incarcerated. Now it becomes covering up corruption. And if there’s one thing the Department of Corrections does better than anybody I’ve ever seen, it’s cover up corruption. They do it so well that the Department of Justice, it took the Department of Justice investigating them and suing the state to start exposing some of it.”
That is not hyperbole.
We’re talking about an agency that has been credibly, and possibly provably, accused of covering up murders. We’re talking about an agency that has spent tens of millions of dollars over the last five years on outside legal fees to defend its indefensible treatment of humans. We’re talking about an agency that costs taxpayers more than $850 million annually to be this awful.
And it’s about to get worse.
Just last week, state officials announced that they would again borrow more money to build two new prisons. We’re now looking at more than $1.2 billion to build those prisons, and let’s be real, we all know it’s going to be way more than that.
During that same interview, England, who sits on the Legislature’s Contract Review Committee, said two new contracts for outside legal representation for ADOC have been presented for $38 million. That would bring the total spent by ADOC to pay one law firm since 2020 to $91 million. On just outside legal counsel. (For context, England said the $38 million is just $17 million short of the entire annual budget for Alabama’s Department of Senior Services.)
Do me a favor: Pause right here and go back through the last few paragraphs and start doing the math on all of these numbers.
And consider when you’re doing that math that it doesn’t include the tens of millions we’re likely going to have to pay to implement what will almost assuredly be dozens of corrective actions imposed by a federal court in the wake of another lawsuit that is set to begin in November. That lawsuit also deals with Alabama’s deplorable treatment of inmates, the conditions of the facilities in which prisoners have been housed and the manner in which they’ve been routinely beaten by Alabama state employees.
The Trump Department of Justice filed that one during Trump’s first term. The DOJ took the likely unprecedented step of suing Alabama’s entire Department of Corrections. No one was able to wriggle free. The DOJ thought everyone was culpable.
It’s a shame that it stopped with the DOJ and didn’t loop in state officials and Alabama legislators.
Because, really, the fraud and abuse is just stupid at this point.
Just a month or so ago, we found out that the company that had the prison health care contract had filed for bankruptcy, leaving in its wake a wave of unpaid bills and unpaid employees. That bankruptcy wasn’t a surprise—England had predicted it two years ago when Alabama signed the contract with YesCare—yet somehow, it turned out even worse than anyone imagined.
Because YesCare didn’t just declare bankruptcy and leave. It first begged Alabama for advance payments in order to pay its employees, England said, and then it didn’t use the money to pay the employees what they were owed. Instead, company officials said they used it for “other things.”
“The absurdity of a company being able to rob the state of Alabama of millions of dollars and it not be an outrage to you …,” England said, shaking his head.
It’s a lonely job being the guy trying desperately to get others to be outraged over this thing that they definitely should be outraged about. Because people should care, right?
Even if there’s something wrong with your brain and you don’t care about the human suffering element of poor prisons, you should at least care about the money aspect. Everyone in America is talking about affordability or waste, fraud and abuse. Our prisons touch on both—bigly.
As you read this, our prison system accounts for $850 million of our annual $3 billion General Fund budget. That’s about a third of all the tax dollars that roll into that budget. For a state that gets outraged every time someone tells a story about a welfare mom with an iPhone and manicured fingernails, you’d think we could muster some outrage for spending a third of our tax dollars on a totally dysfunctional, nearly inoperable state agency that fails consistently at the most basic tasks and fails even worse at properly utilizing tax dollars.
Let me put this in perspective for you: They can’t build a data center large enough or cut a data center deal sketchy enough to cost you more than what our crappy prison system is currently costing you.
Yet, town halls and city council meetings are busting at the seams, rightly, with people filing in to air their concerns over data centers.
While Chris England sits in a room basically alone.
